Yorba Linda residents this fall can expect to consider housing plans that would allow more than 2,400 units of housing to be built, two years after voters overwhelmingly rejected a previous plan by the city.
Yorba Linda needs to adopt an updated housing element — the state-mandated plan that shows where new housing can be built throughout the city – and Yorba Linda Planning Manager Nate Farnsworth said the city is up against a deadline. If not approved by November, the city could face consequences such as financial penalties and having less say over some lower- and middle-income housing construction.
“This is a state requirement, so there’s no getting around it,” Farnsworth said, adding, “We’ll call it the lesser of two evils when you get a choice between either meeting the state requirement under your own terms or meeting the state requirement under the state’s terms.”
Yorba Linda must plan for at least 2,415 units of new housing, though that doesn’t mean all will actually get built, the zoning just has to be in place for developers to have the opportunity.
Yorba Linda is one of the few California cities where voters must approve zoning changes, under Measure B passed in 2006.
The state has given the city more time to get voters to approve a housing element, and now some of the residents who were opposed to the last proposed plan are in support of the latest draft.
In the 2022 election, voters overwhelming rejected the city’s housing plan, with only 24% of voters in favor. The city scrapped that proposal and created a 17-member resident working group to hammer out what would be an agreeable plan.
With the state giving conditional approval to the latest plan, many of the previous opponents will now be asking their neighbors to support the city’s new plan.
“We think that it’s very important that this passes so that we have a certified element,” said Janice Morger, who campaigned against the 2022 measure and was a member of the working group. “Let’s face it, nobody wants any of this. Is it perfect? No, but it’s something we can all live with.”
Morger said it’s important residents pass the new one so the city doesn’t face builder’s remedy, which allows developers to bypass local density limits provided they build a minimum number of affordable units.
Morger said she and other residents pushed the no vote on the 2022 plan because it put too much housing on the west side of town. The new shifts units to Savi Ranch, helping to limit multi-story buildings from being built around single-family homes, Morger said.
While the housing element hasn’t been formally placed on ballots, the City Council is expected to do so.
The city’s housing element won’t be the only housing plan on people’s ballots. A separate measure has already been placed, asking voters to rezone the Bryant Ranch Center shopping mall on the east side of the city to allow for more housing and new retail to be built there. The shopping mall owner sought the public vote after city discussions turned toward downsizing what could be built there.
Bryant Ranch Center has been struggling since 2017, according to Michael Tinio, a consultant for the property.
“We have a high vacancy rate, and a lot of tenants haven’t been able to survive,” Tinio said.
So the center is looking at the possibility of building a mixed-use development where residents live on site and there is more “focused retail and shopping,” Tinio said.
If approved, the shopping mall could have up to 320 apartments built at up to four stories tall.
The Bryant Ranch Center plan, which is being called the Yorba Canyon Community initiative, was certified by the City Council on April 16 as having gathered enough signatures for the November ballot.
The city formed a resident working group that met from last May to June to discuss how best to form a new housing element. The group recommended that the city use Savi Ranch to create a new mixed-use, downtown-like space for Yorba Linda.
Elizabeth Hansburg, executive director of People for Housing OC, said the process to get to a new housing element was flawed since the city turned to the loudest voices against density and rental housing and relegated opportunities to build higher-density affordable housing to one part of the city around Savi Ranch.
“We have concerns that they are limiting all of the higher-destiny housing to one part of town, which happens to be … close to the freeway,” Hansburg said. “You just reinforce that socioeconomic segregation and you put people at risk.”
Hansburg said the state approved a sub-par plan and “the city is getting away with it.”
Russ Heine, another member of the resident working group who opposed the 2022 plan, said there were a lot of heated discussions in the group to reach a consensus and move a plan forward.
“The fact that we were able to mitigate a lot of those high-density clusters in the middle of residential neighborhoods at least helped us feel like we were protecting some of the previous character of the neighborhoods while still conforming with the state mandate,” Heine said. “That was a fine balancing point.”
Heine echoed the sentiment that approving the new housing element is “the better of two bad choices” by keeping a say in what gets built.
“We really just need to get 25% of the people to understand what the risks associated with the no vote are,” Heine said of the 50% majority that would be needed to approve the housing plan on the November ballot.
The city is hosting community meetings to discuss housing plans. There will be a meeting at the East Lake Village Association club house from 6 to 9 p.m. on May 1, another on May 9 at the same time at Bryant Ranch Elementary School and a third on May 23 at the Yorba Linda Community Center.
Yorba Linda’s Planning Commission and City Council will begin public hearings in the coming months to discuss the housing element.
